Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), produced by Antonio Jose Guzman, Iva Jankovic and HKW, with support from the Mondriaan Fund.
Curated by: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Cosmin Costinas, Marie Helene Pereira, Carlos Maria Romero “Atabey” & Paz Guevara.
Visual artists, researchers, dub poets and Afrofuturists Antonio José Guzman and Iva Jankovic’s multidisciplinary works tackle social justice issues and notions of community, identity and ancestry by engaging with the colonial history of textiles, memory and time.
They are inspired by diasporic identities and centre the positive role of migration and community engagement. In Transatlantic Stargate, Guzman and Jankovic reinterpret the transatlantic colonial history of indigo blue textiles to interrogate the Netherlands’ history of slavery and the country’s colonial practices throughout the Black Atlantic.
These textiles, suffused with symbolic, spiritual and historical significance, of stories and memories of diaspora, ancient spirits and sacred powers, became valuable during the transatlantic trade of enslaved people.
For O Quilombismo, Guzman and Jankovic present an arrangement of newly made textiles that uses the same ancient indigo block printing technique called Ajrakh from their previous work, produced in the studio of Sufiyan Ismail Khatri and his team in Ajrakhpur, India.
Ajrakh, which is 4,000 years old, is more than a printing technique; consistent with the spirit of quilombismo, Ajrakh is a way of life and learning, with knowledge and practice passed down through generations.